Pipewire and debian stable here

BT audio works like 99% of the time. Then there’s that 1% it just stops working for no apparent reason and you spend an hour googling why without finding any answers. And in the end, unpairing, forgetting the device and the re-adding it fixes the problem in 2 mins

Overall very happy once i remember the quick fix

I haven’t had any issue with Bluetooth audio on Fedora.

Gentoo and Pipewire kinda just works.

I expected a battle, like on my work Ubuntu laptop with pulse audio, but holy cow… Pipewire ftw.

On Debian Unstable and Arch (both with pipewire) it just worked out of the box for me with no issues.

Vanilla Arch Linux, AirPods work better than on Android (which was super unreliable), but I also don’t care about automatic profile switching as I actually prefer to switch manually to whatever I need at the given moment.

No problem here with Opensuse slowroll (Sway WM) and a Realtek bluetootth radio, I’m using blueman for managing enabling/managing bluetooth connections.

So I’ve recently moved over to using my Pixel buds pro almost full time and am hoping you stoke a convo here to revisit.

KDE Connect affords us the ability to fire off commands from a phone to do any number of things. One use case of mine is to disconnect/reconnect Bluetooth devices from the desktop since it is greedy and tends to bogart my earbuds when playback stops on other connections. This has worked pretty well so far but with that in mind, I have only just started playing around with things and so I look forward to refining the experience with other utilities.

That said, I find Bluetooth is buggy on almost every OS out there (Android is constantly in what feels like a state of repair…)
Best of luck!

I haven’t had any issues.
But it’s not uncommon to a problem somewhere in the Bluetooth stack. It’s important you report any bugs you come across to the respective projects, because of how diverse Bluetooth devices are it’s hard to get perfect support for everything.

Built-in Bluetooth modules tend to “just work” for the most part, but external adapters are a whole other story. They are a pain and it’s best to buy them from somewhere that won’t ask questions if you try to return it.

I remember under pulse I would have issues of programs like discord and my headset breaking the connection over the switch between A2DP and HFP or HSP or whatever the mic mode was. Havent had any issues since pipewire came along and supposedly took over handling that, but I havent used a Bluetooth device with a mic to test with since, so I’m just quoting hearsay that pipewire fixed that.

Sometime HSP just stopped working so now I have to do calls with my laptop built-in mic.

Also, some programs like Zoom just fail to use the right output device no matter what I choose in settings. I just have to make headphones the fallback device for anything to work.

But the most annoying thing is Linux somehow stealing the playback when my headphones are connected to multiple devices. Even when nothing plays on the computer but does play on the phone, there’s no audio. I have to disable/disconnect my computer to use headphones with phone when my computer is in range.

For me, Bluetooth in general is a problematic technology that’s been trustworthy only when the device comes with a pre-paired Bluetooth emitter.

I don’t recall ever having spent a lot of time messing with Bluetooth so I think it’s worked just fine for me for a while. I’ve used Debian, Fedora and Solus on a few different laptops and desktops. I’ll give a few headphones and speakers a go tonight and see what happens.

My need for bluetooth headphone is very simple, if I can understand youtube videos, I am happy. And I am using WF-1000MX4, which works wonderfully just using the gnome gui.

I never need to worry about pipwire or pulse audio etc.